The Rings of Saturnbegins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia.From Lowestoft to Bungay, Sebald's own story becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. The result is a rich meditation on the past via a melancholy trip along the Suffolk coast, and an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human.

Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st CenturyThe Times

W.G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1966 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, and the author ofThe Emigrants, which won a series of major awards, including the Berlin Literature Prize, the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Heinrich HeinePrize and the Joseph Breitbach Prize;The Rings of Saturn, andVertigo. W.G. Sebald wrote in his native tongue, German, and worked closely with his translator, Michael Hulse, to translate his work into English. He died in December 2001.

Michael Hulse has translated Goethe'sThe Sorrows of Young Wertherand Jacob Wasserman'sCaspar Hauser, as well as the contemporary German authors Luise Rinser, Botho Strauss and Elfriede Jelinek. He is also an award-winning poet. He lives in Amsterdam.